scary? did you just wake from a 15 year coma?

you store anything in a big-corp cloud, which you haven't personally encrypted, with keys that only you possess, then assume it's all backed up in fed repos (somewhat hyperbolic, especially for non-crims, but not far fetched by any means)

that's neither new, nor news (sadly)

This is why I don’t bother with RAID (besides 0). If a drive ever fails I just FOIA NSA and all my data shows up a few weeks later, usually with a nasty letter about how this is the last time

I actually did this when it was time to renew my SF 86. I didn’t want to remember all the names and addresses and phone numbers from the last time. So I just did a FOIA on myself and the emailed me my last form already filled out.

What’s an SF 86?

Security clearance

This legitimately made me guffaw. Well done.

"New" isn't a prerequisite for "scary".

I never said it was new nor news, I said it was scary.

why? i'm sure they had a warrent

Irrelevant. If they have a warrant they can physically knock down your door and search your underwear drawer.

Surely it's relevant to point out their long history of illegal surveillance and parallel construction?

I'm not claiming that this was the case here, I just don't think the government deserves the benefit of the doubt.

We don’t need to guess, the article says:

> Working with Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics company, the agents studied thousands of Helix transactions, subpoenaed emails, and ultimately found one involving a website that allows users to buy gift cards with Bitcoin. An email associated with Larry was used to open the account.

If you’ve got an email address associated with a Google account, it’s a plain old warrant.